[Linganth] AAA 2016- CFP: Disability in the Middle East/ North Africa

[MOLLY JOSETTE BLOOM]

Call for papers- please forward widely.

We are organizing a panel for the upcoming AAA meetings in Minneapolis, MN,
November 16-20.

Organizers: Christine Sargent, University of Michigan; Molly Bloom, UCLA
Discussant: Michele Friedner, Stony Brook University

Evidence and inclusion: Ethnography and disability in the Middle East/North
Africa

The principle of inclusion, or *damaj*, has become a central platform of
disability rights movements across the Middle East/North Africa (MENA)
region, linked to national modernization programs and international aid and
development institutions. Straightforward accounts of the public sphere
provided by Habermas (1982) and Anderson (1991) have been extensively
critiqued by scholars of gender and sexuality (Fraser 1985; Scott 1999;
Warner 2002) and by scholars working in postcolonial settings (Chatterjee
1993; Comaroff & Comaroff 1999; Hirschkind 2006). Anthropologists working
in the Middle East, contributing to this conversation, have challenged
conventional notions of private and public and their normative alignment
with particular spheres of political and moral force (Jansen 1987; Meneley
1996; Vom Bruck 1997).

The spaces and institutions associated with “publics” in western political
theories and communities can function, in MENA countries, as sites of
intensive state surveillance and control (Hamdy 2012). As ethnographers of
disability in the MENA region, we approach the actual work of discourses of
inclusion with this critical framework in mind: Inclusion into what? For
whom? By whom? How can we draw on ethnographic evidence to problematize and
theorize inclusion outside the context of the secular, liberal, democratic
nation-state, taking into account historically specific constructions of
rights, belonging, and citizenship?

This panel foregrounds family, community, and morality as three central,
interlinked structures and moral ideals that ethnographers of disability in
the MENA region work with and through; they have specific consequences for
types of spaces, claims, and selves seen as desirable. “The social”
(Roberts 2008) in MENA countries remains deeply linked with and supported
by kinship ties and networks. Family, community, and morality occupy key,
and often oppositional, roles in local political and social discourses that
contrast them with “The West” (Abu-Lughod 1998; Deeb 2006; Moghaddam 2003)
and inform how individuals and communities imagine the future of
“disability worlds” (Rapp & Ginsburg 2013).

The papers on this panel challenge ethnographers to forge stronger links
between the “Anthropologies of Arab-Majority Societies” (Deeb  and Winegar
2012) and the rich tradition of scholarship in the field of disability
studies.
We are seeking panelists that explore similar issues included but not
limited to:
-Disability rights/ activism in the MENA region
-Sign language communities in the MENA region
-Intersection of disability rights, women's rights and LGBTQ rights in the
area
-NGOs serving disabled populations in the MENA region
-mental health issues in the MENA region

If you are interested in participating, please send an email to Molly Bloom
(mjbloom at ucla.edu) expressing plans to submit an abstract. Please send your
abstract (max 250 words) by April 1st. Accepted presenters will be notified
by April 4th, and abstract will be due by April 15th.

Best,
molly bloom

Molly Bloom
PhD Student
Department of Anthropology
UCLA
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